[HN Gopher] The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
___________________________________________________________________
The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
Author : waxpancake
Score : 246 points
Date : 2024-01-18 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waxy.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (waxy.org)
| kristopolous wrote:
| Social networks and marketplaces are the hardest things to get
| going
| edhelas wrote:
| *centralized and siloed social-networks
|
| Federated, standard and decentralized network just live by
| themselves :)
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. Federated social networks have the
| same hard problem as centralized ones: social networks
| require people.
|
| The part that's hard is the people, not the technology.
| Centralization and federation have nothing to do with it.
| myfriendnewton wrote:
| That's one of the things that makes Ello's story a bit sad. It
| started out as a community of people that had this natural
| gravity, and the early community was admirably dedicated to the
| experiment.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > After leaving Ello in 2016, Budnitz returned to his Kidrobot
| roots with the launch of Superplastic in 2017, a vinyl figure
| company that expanded into NFTs and the metaverse in 2022,
| raising a total of $68M in seven rounds of funding, led by
| Amazon. Superplastic appears to have abandoned its NFT projects
| last year as the market cratered, and Budnitz stepped down from
| his CEO role in September, replaced by the former president of
| blockchain gaming company Dapper Labs. They are now focused on
| "synthetic celebrities" and AI influencers.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| Grifting is more lucrative than ever!
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I thought this recent article was so insightful:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39014737
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| This is the game. Raise money, steal it, let the company go to
| the dogs.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I am often jealous of the people who make huge sums of money
| grifting investors, but the thing is I care too much about
| what I do and I'd be bad at pretending I don't.
|
| The flip side is I instead love what I do and I'm very proud
| of my work, which I don't think someone could really say if
| they're shilling crap like plastic toys and NFTs. Or maybe
| they could say that, but I never could. Grifting is just not
| for me.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I used to work in public service (in chronological order,
| ranger, social security, LLC incorporation and radio
| spectrum licensing and management) before jumping into
| software with glee.
|
| And I have the exact same thought about providing software
| for government and other large organisations.
|
| The number of "solutions" my public service employers paid
| millions for, that didn't fucking work properly or reliably
| is mental.
|
| I'm really not sure how contracts keep getting signed by
| big organisations that don't impose massive penalties on
| providers for failure, but it they do. Or the sister org
| that finally had enough and wanted to switch providers, and
| had to go to court in order to be even be able to pay a
| large amount for the IP rights to the source code of their
| system, because they'd signed a contract that let the
| provider retain IP, and the provider really liked that
| sweet sweet taxpayer money for buggy bollocks. So
| naturally, when they contracted HP to maintain the system
| they ensured that the contract retained IP ownership for
| their org.
|
| Haha, no, I'm kidding, they let HP keep IP rights on
| changes HP made, and later on had to fight HP in the courts
| so they could pay HP for the source to switch providers
| again after getting sick of being charged $2K (USD) by HP
| to update the text of a single link on a website.
|
| And I keep thinking that I'd very much like to be in the
| market of earning millions by providing broken software to
| people making big decisions who aren't competent enough to
| jump to private sector, broken software is easy.
|
| But then the guilt of stealing taxpayer money kicks in
| (it's not legally stealing, but morally, it's stealing. As
| the saying kinda goes, any great criminal needs a great
| lawyer, a great accountant, and a corporation), as well as
| the guilt of professional ethics.
|
| (What's the old joke about software ethics? An ethical
| programmer would never write a function called
| destroyBaghdad, they'd write a function called destroyCity
| and pass Baghdad as a parameter.)
|
| But look at Birmingham Council in the UK, bankrupted by
| shit software and Oracle's fearsome legal team. The entire
| fucking disgrace that is Horizon (although being fair to
| Fujitsu, nearly all of the evil was on their customer's
| side, it was only aided and abetted by Fujitsu employees
| lying in court).
|
| In my country, IBM sued our government (and won) because
| IBM wanted to be paid even more for not delivering a
| massively expensive and broken project to the Police
| (INCIS), more recently our Education dept spent $180
| million on a payroll system called Novopay (they also paid
| the provider Talent2 to administer payroll with it) that
| was terribly broken and underpaid some teachers (and
| perhaps more egregiously, slightly overpaid some teachers,
| then the provider would eventually realise and demand the
| teacher repay the overpayment be returned in full in a
| short timeframe or debt collectors would be brought in, and
| threats of civil litigation or criminal complaints were
| used to pressure them) to the extent that teachers had to
| go on strike to get the government to take it seriously.
|
| Eventually the government took back the admin side of it,
| and then gave Talent2 another $45 million to get the system
| working, and are still paying them to maintain it today.
|
| The idea of being in a market where delivering badly broken
| software leads to you getting paid another 25% of the
| upfront cost to get it actually working, and you don't get
| fired, is wild.
|
| I suppose there's a reason that Oracle and similar are
| described as law firms that incidentally write software,
| but damn, they make crypto grifters look like complete
| amateurs.
|
| And I'll begrudgingly admit that Oracle et al are selling a
| product with actual utility at least, as opposed to NFTs
| which I'd call digital tulip bulbs, but that is mean to
| tulip bulbs because they can at least be used to grow
| flowers.
|
| I've seen 0 use cases for NFTs / ICOs that aren't
| gambling/unhinged speculation (usually with some fraud
| involved to make Number Go up to suck in the rubes), or
| just good old fashioned direct to the consumer fraud
| dressed up in complicated jargon.
| StreetChief wrote:
| > CEO Harry Stonecipher, a cutthroat corporate operative who
| liked to say, "You can make a lot of money going out of
| business." - https://jacobin.com/2024/01/boeing-malfunction-
| ceo-pay-stock...
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| This post is a long-ass "told you so" and honestly, I'm here for
| it. I too had an Ello account and thoroughly enjoyed its
| minimalist nature.
|
| VC money really seems like the beginning of the end.
| ErikAugust wrote:
| "But a little digging shows a much more predictable source: they
| took a $435,000 round of seed funding in January from FreshTracks
| Capital, a Vermont-based VC firm that announced the deal in
| March."
|
| People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont
| thing.
|
| I once spitballed with a certain VC at FreshTracks Capital about
| an idea I had, which lead to him running off with it and burning
| millions of dollars making it into BRIDJ, which shut down a few
| years ago.
| myfriendnewton wrote:
| > People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont
| thing.
|
| True, but a little misleading. The majority of the co-founders
| of Ello, plus nearly all of its staff, were based in Colorado.
|
| Source: I worked for Ello.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Well now I have to ask - what was it like inside the
| cauldron? Any learnings you took into your next step?
| myfriendnewton wrote:
| It was my favorite job I've ever had. It was intense in the
| best way. I didn't have much contact with Budnitz, but the
| other 6 founders showed such a strong passion for the
| community, it was impossible for me to not to come to work
| excited.
|
| I'd say most of the negative stress I felt was from knowing
| that the user base was growing faster than we could fill in
| feature gaps that would keep folks engaged. I felt like we
| couldn't quite catch up, and by the time the money started
| running out and interest started to wane, it was too late.
|
| A few learnings:
|
| - 7 founders is a lot. I don't want that to sound like a
| criticism, it just means the company is going to feel a bit
| different vs a more classic 2 or 3 founder setup.
|
| - Positive feedback loops within a tight team of highly
| skilled people has a huge impact on getting more stuff
| done. That's how I would characterize the engineering team,
| and it was one of the highest-performing teams I've ever
| been a part of.
|
| - Don't build a startup on a custom, in-house UI framework
| ;)
| cole-k wrote:
| Even the supposedly indie anti-social social media outright
| violated their own manifesto. Is it any surprise that we're
| skeptical of the big promises of a bright future that
| corporations make all the time?
|
| I'm curious to know if anyone has evidence of a post similar to
| this but for a company with a (so far) happy ending.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I would have said bandcamp, until recently
|
| Itch.io continues to be great, for now
| gwern wrote:
| I'm interested about the public benefit corporation part here.
| Did the PBC status wind up changing anything at all here? How
| does a PBC sell itself or get acquired? How is a PBC supposed
| to terminate or wind down? If they violate their charter as
| Ello may have, who exactly enforces it or file a lawsuit, and
| what is their compensation?
| komadori wrote:
| I suppose if the PBC was in debt then it could sell its
| assets, such as the Ello site, to pay its creditors and then
| dissolve.
| renewiltord wrote:
| When ICANN was in danger of violating charter, CA AG was the
| one who enforced on them.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Nobody should trust my opinion, I am not an attorney, let
| alone one specialized in this area.
|
| In my understanding, a PBC is effectively the same as a for-
| profit company with regards to these sorts of things. Unlike
| a non-profit, a PBC has stock, which it can sell, so that's
| how it would get acquired. I believe that there were even
| some PBC SPACs back when that was fashionable.
|
| > If they violate their charter as Ello may have, who exactly
| enforces it or file a lawsuit, and what is their
| compensation?
|
| The only real thing a PBC does is change "shall maximize
| shareholder value" to "shall be managed in a manner that
| balances the stockholders' pecuniary interests, the best
| interests of those materially affected by the corporation's
| conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified
| in its certificate of incorporation." See here for Delaware:
| https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/
|
| So it would look like any other shareholder grievance against
| management in form.
| otteromkram wrote:
| More PBC vs non-profit info[0]:
|
| > Benefit corporations are neither nonprofits nor hybrid
| nonprofits. Benefit corporations are for-profit
| corporations that need to consider stakeholders, morals, or
| missions in addition to making a profit for their
| shareholders. Nonprofits can't be benefit corporations, but
| they may create one. Due to the public benefit purpose
| provisions, expanded fiduciary duties of administrators,
| and extra shareholder rights created within the model
| benefit corporation laws, this structure may be helpful to
| operate and scale the earned-income activities of a
| nonprofit.
|
| [0] https://www.upcounsel.com/public-benefit-corporation
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Where in that document are you seeing that non P.B.C.
| corporations are required to maximize shareholder value?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| This document only talks about PBCs, so it wouldn't be in
| this document. I am using that phrase because that's how
| people refer to fiduciary duty when speaking generally.
| Obviously there is a lot of complexity in the rules
| around corporate governance.
| creer wrote:
| In a slightly broader manner, free software forking has been
| working out reasonably well: When the original branch goes off
| the rails, others can take over from a previous "known
| manageable" point. Forking leads to fractioning the user base
| but kinda, that's the point.
| mawise wrote:
| I started building an open source private blogging system[1] when
| my first kid was born, and it eventually evolved into the
| skeleton of a social network--but fully decentralized using RSS
| and self- (or paid-) hosting. I concluded the only way for a
| network to actually avoid selling out was for there to be nothing
| to sell. If I give away the software, and don't control the
| network then there is no need for users to trust me. It continues
| to be an interesting journey as a side-project (not raising money
| means I'm still working a day-job).
|
| [1]: https://havenweb.org
| gameshot911 wrote:
| FYI, clicking the "Try the Demo" button doesn't do anything for
| me in Chrome or Firefox.
| mawise wrote:
| Well that's awkward. Thanks for the tip--fixed now.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Most of these platforms will never reach "popular" scale.
|
| You need to think about the killer article or feature.
| dopeboy wrote:
| I'm a recovering founder after winding down my startup a couple
| months ago. I've been thinking about getting back on the saddle
| and in service of that, meeting with folks who could be potential
| co-founders.
|
| One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to
| bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very
| different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly
| importantly, expectation.
|
| You _have_ to know that from the outset, else it's just trouble.
| laurex wrote:
| Bootstrapping social tech ain't easy. Expectations that this
| tech is free, plus the immediate need for support and safety
| for general populations mean that it's very different than say,
| B2B SaaS.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Good points - social communities have less of an autopilot
| component than b2b SaaS.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's a shame that it's completely lost, they had some interesting
| layout conventions and it was kind of fun to browse images even
| in the later days.
|
| The network never really caught on, but there was some good work
| being done there.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I thought this was a fantastic post. I think it really dovetailed
| with what I've been thinking a lot about recently regarding my
| disillusionment with tech (or, rather, with big tech companies).
|
| I think everyone should understand (and, honestly, repeat daily)
| that in our modern capitalist system where never-ending growth is
| an _expected requirement_ of any company that has ever taken
| outside funding, it is simply an impossibility for a company to
| have any kind of durable values that conflict with that growth-
| at-all-costs requirement. It 's as much of an impossibility as
| the sun rising in the west, and we should stop any pretense that
| it's not. Enshittification is _inevitable_.
|
| Nearly every tech company starts out similarly: an absolute laser
| focus on users and their needs, because that is how you first
| grow. At some point, though, all of that fruit is picked, and you
| then start going into features that are "user neutral" but that
| make money, until finally you chip away at features that look
| like they can be user neutral in the short term ("We A/B tested
| and nobody minded one more ad!"), but the long term effect is
| that you've completely destroyed your founding ethos.
|
| For example, it's easy to pick on Google these days because it's,
| well, so easy. Their total about face from a company that was
| nearly universally loved by engineers to one that, if not
| loathed, is at best seen as the "next IBM" is so obvious. E.g.
| Google got huge originally with a world-first search engine by
| not "selling out", by not masquerading ads as organic search
| results. Now when I search for any remotely commercial term the
| entire first page is ads that are nearly indistinguishable from
| organic results.
|
| It's not just Google, though. Apple loves to crow about user
| privacy, but it's hard to square this "value" with their
| insistence that anyone on iOS who uses iMessage to talk to anyone
| on Android gets 0 encryption (oh, and if even a single Android
| user is in a group chat, nobody gets encryption).
|
| I don't think that makes any company "evil", but it does make it
| somewhat sociopathic in the sense that there can ever only be a
| single goal: growth at all costs. The sooner we all recognize it
| means we can treat all companies with an appropriate level of
| caution. One final note related to this, is that this is one
| reason I'm not really a fan of PBCs as mentioned in the article.
| PBCs are a smoke-screen. As the saying goes, "Follow the money".
| When push-comes-to-shove you'll also see PBCs compromise their
| "values" the second growth starts to be at risk.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| Yes, this is a tech thing in particular. You don't see VC being
| raised for a plumbing company, they'll get an SBA loan or
| bootstrap. They don't need to grow 10x every year, if the
| owners can pay their bills and send their kids to college
| they're happy.
|
| And plumbing is such a constitutionally important thing: having
| hot, running water and not having feces in your house is so
| much important than seeing what that guy from high school is up
| to.
|
| I think the issue lays with how high-variance tech is due to
| the scale: either it is marginally profitable at a massive
| scale and is worth billions of dollars, or you have something
| that is unprofitable at any scale and is worthless. It's like
| there's all of the sudden (in the last 15 years) become an
| appetite for throwing fortunes onto a roulette table (which may
| be giving better odds than a lot of VCs).
| mandevil wrote:
| Two things here.
|
| One is that the marginal cost of software(1) drives this
| pattern of winners and losers. The first user of any software
| costs an enormous amount of money to actually write the
| software and deliver it to customers. The 100th user costs
| basically nothing once you have 99 others. And the millionth
| user (or billionth) user costs basically nothing as well(2).
| That in turn means that having a billion users is a lot more
| profitable than having a million users, which means that if
| you have a billion users you can afford to do things that the
| million user system can't- e.g. free webmail and a really
| good free internet browser, just to name two things picked
| completely at random and not having any particular company in
| mind.
|
| The other point is explaining your comment about the "last 15
| years": tech's dominance (really, growth's dominance) is
| really an artifact of zero-lower-bounds interest rates from
| the 2008 financial crisis. If interest rates are zero (for
| discounted future cash flow computations) then I am
| indifferent about a dollar today versus a dollar in 2075. So
| someone who can argue that they have a 5% chance of being
| worth a trillion dollars in 2075 is worth a lot (0.05 * 1T=50
| billion) when interest rates are zero, but if interest rates
| are high (or even, honestly, normal- like 2-3%) then that
| money is discounted heavily and the growth story doesn't
| matter as much because dollars today are worth a lot more
| than dollars in 2075. So if interest rates are zero, future
| growth will dominate the stock market (which was why 'tech'
| did well) but when interest rates are more normal, different
| companies can dominate the stock market (where the
| fundamental valuation of a company is, roughly, the expected
| value of future cash-flows discounted to the present).
|
| 1: Delivered by the internet- physical media distorts this a
| bit and behaves more like normal retail goods.
|
| 2: Exceptions for certain points in the growth curve where
| some key system falls over and needs to be rapidly replaced,
| e.g. storage or compute or whatever, but outside of those
| it's very cheap growth. Plumber company growth is limited by
| the number of trained plumbers you can hire- you can only
| have 1 plumber make so many house calls in one day- but
| software just replicates at zero out to infinity (again
| modulo some key systems which can't handle the load).
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I remember when tech twitter (or at least Node.js twitter) tried
| to migrate to Ello for like a week.
|
| A pretty good portion of my social network moved, myself
| included. But it fizzled out really quickly and we all ended up
| back on Twitter.
|
| Every once in a while I'd still get a notification from Ello that
| someone had followed me. It was always a porn bot, but the email
| notification was still nostalgic. A part of me is sad the site
| died.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I remember when something-something twitter tried to migrate to
| Threads for like a week.
|
| And to Mastodon before that.
|
| Remember when tech Reddit tried to migrate to Lemmy?
|
| A hardcore handful of people migrate await from the Death Star
| and stay migrated (maybe a couple hundred medium accounts, and
| 1 or 2 bigger ones), but everybody else trickles back onto the
| Death Star eventually.
|
| The only thing that works to get people permanently migrated
| away is complete enshitification of the existing platform (i.e.
| Digg effect). Partial enshitification isn't enough.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Twxttxr is getting pretty close now - maybe in some ways
| surpassing Digg in awfulness.
|
| Specifically the massive level of pornbot traffic, and
| algorithm changes that seem to be intentionally surfacing
| posts to adversarial users who will then go on the attack.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| The porn bots are pervasive and easily identifiable
| programmatically.
|
| That they persist must mean that X wants them to persist.
| senkora wrote:
| Mastodon and Lemmy do feel different to me, because of the
| decentralization.
|
| They are providing a foundation that gets built upon with
| every migration wave, and I think it's plausible that they
| will eventually break into the mainstream.
|
| Put another way, the fediverse is the first alternative that
| doesn't need to "succeed" in order for development to
| continue. It's a bootstrapped model. And so it can grow
| quietly, work out the usability kinks over time, and be ready
| to absorb users whenever they get fed up with the centralized
| platforms.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Just a reminder:
|
| If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
|
| The internet culture birthed from the early days of the internet
| "Everything is free", seems to have captured a whole generation
| who simply have no concept of cost and value.
|
| Vid.me is another start-up that comes to mind: Youtube sucks, has
| too many ads, and sells your data. We won't have ads, won't sell
| your data, and will host all your content.
|
| It made it four years before investor cash dried up and they said
| goodbye.
| B56b wrote:
| That's exactly it. I'm not sure what about software in
| particular makes people think that it can exist without
| funding. People have no problem paying for a physical product,
| but virtual products are hard to justify for some reason.
| Thrymr wrote:
| A large part is that the marginal cost per copy approaches
| zero. It was hard enough to charge for software when it came
| in a box on a store shelf, now it has to be wrapped in a
| service.
| creer wrote:
| > If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
|
| That's a fun quip (and often correct) but the world needs a way
| to run this kind of project. Community? free? transparent? etc,
| etc.
|
| And I think this issue is not just about "free systems",
| culture changes and day to day corruption creeps and destroys
| everything. Even die-hard for-profit institutions (where entire
| branches might go rogue on their own objectives.)
| Earw0rm wrote:
| It's hard to relate it to scale, is why.
|
| A sandwich costs $5 everywhere, and a car costs $30k
| everywhere, because that's just what those things cost to make.
|
| It's relatively difficult to look at a web service and
| determine whether its running costs are normal guy hobby money,
| rich guy hobby money, or no seriously this won't last six
| months without VC money.
|
| Decentralised and P2P systems run themselves, but it's hard for
| them to maintain a centre of gravity without offering something
| specific, and given that the network itself can't produce value
| out of thin air, it's probably not coincidental that the ones
| best able to maintain gravity are offering stuff stolen from
| elsewhere.
| woah wrote:
| Decentralized systems still need ongoing development and
| maintenance.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Sometimes you're still the product if you pay for the product.
|
| (YouTube, Uber, Airbnb, etc...)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There are numerous cases in which paying customers are _also_
| the product, most notably any captive-market advertising
| situation: transit, air travel, hospitality, cable and
| streaming services, telecoms (wired or wireless), and more.
|
| The truth is that a profit-maximising business will seek
| revenue opportunities where it can, and if that means selling
| _both_ services, on a single-instance or subscription basis,
| _and_ advertising, it will do both.
|
| Advertising-only or advertising-dominated businesses have a
| strong tendency to degrade faster and far more prolifically
| than those with mixed-model funding (I still find _The
| Economist_ 's three-legged revenues stool fascinating:
| subscriptions, advertising, and Economist Intelligence Unit
| bespoke consulting and research services, each roughly 1/3 of
| total revenues).
|
| Paying alone, however, is a far-from-sufficient condition.
| darnfish wrote:
| Anyone wanna place a bet on how likely that an order from here
| would be delivered?
|
| https://ello.threadless.com/designs/white-ello-shirt/mens/t-...
| ajhurliman wrote:
| I've got 5 on it, DM for Venmo when you get your shirt or 10
| weeks have elapsed since purchase.
| slater wrote:
| Considering that the order would be fulfilled by Threadless (an
| Actually Good(tm) company) and not by Ello, why do you think
| you wouldn't get the tee?
| Lerc wrote:
| Taking investor money means users will required to pay, one way
| or another.
|
| Without an explicitly capped profit, I can't see how this doesn't
| eventually lead to exploitation of the users.
|
| I would like to see a donation/optional subscription model with
| tiered features as is seen in Patreon/Kickstarter etc. with the
| distinction that the tiers are community wide instead of being
| bound to the individuals donating.
|
| Display an income bar. If it drops to zero the servers turn off.
| If it drops below 1 nobody can post. If it is above 1 you have
| Direct messaging, above 2 you have more features, etc. Keep the
| communication clear as to what is being provided and how it is
| being paid for.
|
| Most people won't pay, but if nobody pays there is no service.
| Its survival would depend upon providing a service that satisfies
| enough people to sustain the support. This certainly wouldn't be
| as lucrative as a exploit the users model, but the idea is not to
| make a fortune, but to simply run a sustainable enterprise.
| rgbrgb wrote:
| Income bar / donation thing sounds extremely stressful and
| precarious if you're paying anyone a salary.
|
| Capped profit is interesting since it doesn't limit the
| business model, just the likelihood of enshitification.
| wavemode wrote:
| Running a startup AT ALL is extremely stressful and
| precarious if you're paying anyone a salary. 90% of startups
| die in flames. Stress and danger are table stakes, I would
| think.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Most people won't pay, but if nobody pays there is no service
|
| Wouldn't this be at risk of Bystander Effect?
| muppetman wrote:
| I'm amazed by the number of people who trust websites like this
| with their memories/diaries etc. I mean, I understand why,
| there's an expectation when you start with these sites they'll be
| around forever - most people don't have the time, the knowledge
| or the desire to "do it themselves" - When livejournal was all
| the rage I decided to do it myself with Postnuke, then (and
| still!) Drupal. Going on 24 years now. That said, LiveJournal is
| still going, but owned by a Russian company I think, and it could
| turn off tomorrow.
|
| I guess the flipside is, if I die tomorrow and then there's a PHP
| error on my website, no one's ever going to know how to fix it.
| So my memories and diary entries die as well. My "fix" for that
| is to export the ~2400 diary entires every few months into one
| massive PDF file.
|
| Edit: I understand why this is being downvoted, I just want to
| clarify that I didn't mean the opening sentence to read as if
| people who trust 3rd party websites to their hosting were
| silly/dumb, though I realise now that's how it scans. What I
| should have said was "It's very unfortunate and a sad state of
| the current Internet that people trust websites like this..."
| creer wrote:
| That is the main takeaway from all these. The lesson is not
| that venture capital ruined it. But that eventually, at some
| point, either the founder or circumstances change the thing.
| The one permanent here is that it's bit on a digital network.
| By definition not permanent. And so people run into this again
| and again and still don't believe that XYZ might be next.
|
| But it is, XYZ is their business platform, their social media
| network, their journals, their photo hoster, their "lifetime
| membership", etc. I ran into this all the time with clients.
| They would worry about what happens to their consultant, but
| never to their infrastructure.
|
| So for businesses: have a plan B, and have usable archives /
| backups. And for individuals, have a plan B, and have usable
| archives / backups.
| jchw wrote:
| I know that nobody is purporting to have the answer, and I am
| definitely not trying to suggest that there's anything wrong with
| the conclusions drawn here--quite the contrary, actually. But, if
| VC funding is clearly a bad way to go about things, then what is
| the best way to structure and fund an organization built around a
| network or service that is primarily in the game of serving user-
| generated content and providing social networking and chatting
| services?
|
| VC funding has a lot of problems. Funding via advertising is
| similarly fraught with peril, maybe worse, especially the most
| lucrative stuff. You can fund things by selling premium content
| or features, but this too is rather tenuous: if you are say,
| SoundCloud, one of your primary customers is inevitably going to
| be artists, who themselves are by and large not rich.
|
| Not to mention, no matter who you focus your monetization on, $1
| is infinitely more than $0, and monetizing useful features or
| access to content will inevitably lower the overall value of your
| platform. This is presumably part of why advertising is so
| enticing: end users don't have to "pay" anything. Sure,
| advertising isn't _literally_ free, but users do not have to set
| up a payment method and take money from their account and send it
| to yours, which is a massive difference, and massively increases
| accessibility.
|
| Then there's stuff like crowdfunding. Platforms that let you do
| one-off funding campaigns like Kickstarter or Gofundme, or
| platforms that let you do monthly subscriptions in exchange for
| "rewards" like Patreon or FANBOX. There even is a platform that
| is partly funded by monthly subscription payments (Misskey.io)
| and although I'm sure it is a relatively small part of the
| funding (at least I would certainly assume so) it still seems to
| have been successful nonetheless.
|
| And that's just funding. What about structure? Becoming a non-
| profit or public benefit corporation is seemingly not any kind of
| sure-fire way to avoid trouble, as can be seen here. While I
| don't know exactly how the legalese works around a lot of these
| topics, it feels like these measures simply don't do enough to
| prevent corruption or at the very least, undesired future changes
| in direction. You want a company to have autonomy to carry out
| its vision and try to survive in the process, but you don't want
| it to compromise its core values in the process. Is there
| anything you can do legally and/or socially to provide better
| assurances?
|
| This is very frustrating because I think a lot of us see the sad
| state of the Internet and want to do something, but it's hard to
| work towards it because you can also see a graveyard of good
| intentions gone horribly awry. There's all kinds of attempts to
| work around it, but as a wise man once said, "Mo Money Mo
| Problems". It seems that the temptation to exploit things always
| manages to find a way around your safeguards to prevent things
| from being exploited. Just to beat a dead horse even more,
| remember the last time you were excited for a Google product
| announcement, like say, GMail? I'm not saying they were ever a
| charity or intending to be... but it's hard to not see the
| painful way in which values that were once hard-fought slowly
| fade away. Somehow, eventually, everything becomes rent-seeking,
| a game to see how much money you can get back from an investment.
| One would hope there is a way out that doesn't involve a very
| painful upheaval of society, but over time it's getting harder
| and harder to believe it.
| creer wrote:
| Day to day corruption is a problem. And if we had a solution,
| it would be known (the concept of bug bounties goes in the
| right direction, perhaps). I think this is a fundamental
| problem and research opportunity with the legal forms for
| institutions and staff incentives.
|
| Even "winding down" doesn't necessarily need to be a problem.
| It's all in the "how" it's done.
| laurex wrote:
| True. I'm working on a project to answer some of these
| questions and consider innovations that might have an
| alternative outcome. We hope to make it a collaborative project
| with wiki-like tendencies. To me, figuring out how to create
| technical social infrastructure that does not inherently have
| anti-social incentives is one of the most important problems of
| this moment.
| Andrex wrote:
| > I felt sad for the guy. It's awful going through life never
| believing in anything.
|
| Being an idealist is fine, but being a dick is not. This article
| took on some personal schadenfreude after I read this line.
| rurp wrote:
| Hah, same here. That line jumped out to me as a big toxic red
| flag.
|
| The quotes further down from users who suddenly lost all of
| their content were sad to read. It sucks how often regular
| people get burned for taking tech companies at their word.
| tytso wrote:
| There was definitely a certain amount of "I told you so" vibes,
| but I don't blame the author. It appears that he was attacked
| by a lot of Ello founders and fans for raising some cautionary
| notes. And as it turns out, he was right and they were wrong.
|
| We would all like to have a model where users don't get charged
| money, and yet are not the product. But I haven't seen a model
| that works to date. In some cases, I don't mind my personal
| date getting sold; in other cases I pay money because the
| service is valuable. But I certainly make backups since I don't
| assume that even when I pay $$$, that the company might not go
| poof in the night....
| SamBam wrote:
| I believe GP was referring to the Ello founder Budnitz, who
| said that line, as the "dick."
|
| I agree. He was responding to perfectly justified -- and
| accurate -- criticism by saying how sad it is to be a person
| with such views of the world.
| Andrex wrote:
| Yes. The author of the article knows how to write
| enjoyably.
|
| The CEO he was quoting is the subject of my schadenfreude.
| jnsie wrote:
| It's funny, the author went out of their way to give the
| company the benefit of the doubt...but they come across
| extremely arrogant and sometimes vitriolic. I wouldn't have
| been so positive
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm a participant in a community that explicitly refuses money
| from outside its membership. If that means we can't grow fast, or
| have fancy digs, so be it.
|
| The reason for that, is to avoid having influence from outside.
| Even "angel" investment can be problematic, as the "angel" has
| the ear of the leadership.
|
| I have found that even well-meaning outsiders can have highly
| destructive influence, because they don't understand the culture
| and they aren't the ones on the hook, if things go pear-shaped,
| as opposed to the ones that have a real, personal, stake (like
| all those Ello users, who lost so much).
| laurex wrote:
| It's very interesting and telling that most of the technology
| that connects us does not have us as a customer, or a financial
| beneficiary. One of the key aspects of technofeudalism is the
| extractive nature of most of our platforms.
| klipt wrote:
| Because given the choice it seems many people prefer free
| with ads to paid?
|
| I'm just thankful that mobile phone networks haven't switched
| to a "free with ads interspersed into your texts" model yet.
|
| (Of course there are _still_ ads in my texts, but at least
| those are officially spam rather than network endorsed.)
| laurex wrote:
| This is an argument for standards. You can switch messaging
| clients. Platforms own you.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Yes, and Gmail email is such a successful example.
| NoraCodes wrote:
| It is. I switched away from Gmail; many have.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Imagine if the progenitors of email thought to require
| e-stamps, say a thousand emails for a buck. There's a
| parallel universe where 'Email co.' is a major tech
| player comparable to Google. Not sure it's a better
| universe, but bears consideration.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| In the late 1980s, I worked for a company that wanted to
| do exactly that.
|
| It was an X.400-based nightmare, and never took off.
| unholythree wrote:
| I remember a joke (or conspiracy theory) from the 90's
| that the US Postal Service wanted to charge people per
| email.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It is always so tragic to me that, for over a decade, I
| would have paid for Twitter. But by the time they rolled
| that out, enough had changed that there's no way I was
| going to pay for Twitter.
|
| Market timing is hard.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's a customer choice. Metafilter charges money and there
| are others that do as well.
| darcys22 wrote:
| The issue is that without funding a projects velocity is low
| and that can frustrate the community.
|
| Everyone says they are on board with supporting the little
| guys, until they hit bugs and start complaining.
| wtbdrgb wrote:
| and how much do you know about the internal workings of that
| community? how much do you know about it's "future"? how
| transparent is it about how much time top level management and
| leadership are investing and how they are compensated for it?
| how much do you know about the financial sponsors of the
| members of your community?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Actually, a whole lot.
|
| But that's a story for a different venue...
| bdcravens wrote:
| That's a name I haven't thought of for several years.
|
| I wonder if Fediverse, Blue Sky, etc will catch, or if it'll end
| up in the same boat. Threads too (yes it's backed by Meta, but G+
| had Google behind it ...)
| mdasen wrote:
| The reason I feel confident in the Fediverse's longevity is
| that it's independently hosted. If BlueSky ran out of money
| tomorrow and shut down its servers, BlueSky is gone. If
| mastodon.social ran out of money and shut down its servers, the
| Fediverse would continue.
|
| There would be pain if mastodon.social failed with zero notice.
| People would lose access to their accounts and would need to
| find a new server where they'd be starting over. Some may have
| backed up their contacts, but most wouldn't. If mastodon.social
| gave a couple months notice, people could migrate to other
| servers. given that mastodon.social is the largest server,
| there would be some growing pains as other servers worked to
| accommodate new users, but it's possible for the Fediverse to
| continue.
|
| Note, I'm not saying that the Fediverse will be incredibly
| popular. I'm simply noting that there's an amount of
| resilience. Once Ello's owners ran out of interest or money,
| that was the end of Ello. Even if others had a huge interest in
| seeing it continue, there was nothing they could do. Even if
| the Fediverse doesn't "catch" by your definition of catching
| on, it has caught on for enough people who have moved there and
| will remain there.
|
| That's why I feel happier in the Fediverse. It feels like
| something the community controls. Sure, I don't run my own
| server, but I possibly could in the future and there are enough
| people running servers that I don't feel beholden to any one
| entity. It just feels like something that can stick around -
| even if the cool kids aren't interested. Enough of us like it
| and we'll keep it going even if some of us become disinterested
| in it.
| riffic wrote:
| the genie that is the Fediverse (based on interoperable and
| open web protocols) is impossible to place back into its
| bottle.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| There's a couple of key differences between Google backing
| Google+ and Meta backing Threads.
|
| 1. Meta's entire business is social apps, and Google's is not.
| There are strategic differences in approach as a result. 2.
| Google+ was an attempt to disrupt Facebook's rise at the height
| of Facebook's popularity. People _liked_ FB then - so trying to
| get them to switch to another product was harder. Threads
| shipped during a time of volatility with Xitter and is poised
| to capture more of that audience as Xitter continues to decay.
|
| In terms of how things will change in the space over time,
| Threads choice to support ActivityPub will probably mean good
| things for the Fediverse in general, at least in the short term
| (3E notwithstanding), and could ultimately serve to be the
| arbiter that kills BlueSky and the AT Protocol.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| I wonder if it's possible to take the Wikipedia model (open
| source, non profit entity) and use that to build a social
| network.
| novagameco wrote:
| I always thought it would be cool if every NPR/PBS station also
| ran Fediverse nodes of mastodon or whatever the Fediverse
| version of Facebook is. Would provide a public-funded option
| with more transparency
| munchler wrote:
| Deleted
| rglullis wrote:
| The BBC started running their own instance as an experiment,
| and it seems that they will _not_ keep it running:
| https://mstdn.social/@isleofmandan/111775751771437531
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Yeah, I like the federated idea, but I think it had its
| chance when Elon took over Twitter and they never managed to
| capture the exodus of users in any significant way. The
| barrier to entry was just too high (but they have taken great
| steps to reduce the complexity).
| novagameco wrote:
| Well my experience with Mastodon has been that it's almost
| entirely tech people who are joining mastodon for the
| technical novelty. If every NPR/PBS station launched a
| social network concurrently, then people would quickly find
| other people on the platform to connect with
| vdaea wrote:
| Wikipedia is special in that 1) it's very cacheable so the
| infrastructure costs are low and 2) it's not too expensive in
| terms of development since I assume people don't expect many
| features.
| paulddraper wrote:
| It also has a better charity story, because "summarizing the
| knowledge of mankind" seems a tag more lofty than a social
| network.
|
| (Even if that's not the case...)
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Like WT Social?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WT_Social
|
| https://wt.social/
| Kye wrote:
| Makes me think about how Bluesky is also a Public Benefit
| Corporation and took $8m in funding.
| StreetChief wrote:
| Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it, or
| whatever the saying is.
| caboteria wrote:
| That, mixed with "there's a sucker born every minute".
| zzzeek wrote:
| this post is a bit of a "nyah nyah I told you so", but since
| whoever was running Ello did not give any heads up to users a way
| to get at their content, they just allowed the thing to buzz into
| the ground and they shut off all communication, they deserve it.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Oh wow, I'd totally forgotten about Ello. They were never going
| mainstream with that yuppie aesthetic
| thimkerbell wrote:
| HN is just doomy-doomy-doomy today. Sad.
| riffic wrote:
| defunct social networking services, a list from wikipedia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
| jl6 wrote:
| Looks like Archive Team didn't manage to get anything before it
| disappeared :(
| paulddraper wrote:
| > I figured I'd publish a short list of things Ello will never
| do:
|
| > ...
|
| > 2. Tolerate hate. Ello has many tools, some visible and others
| not, that help keep this network positive.
|
| Geez, it's hard to take anything said as authentic with a
| statement like that. How can you talk about things without
| "hate"?
|
| "I hate shoveling snow." "I hate terrorists." "I hate this
| political candidate." "I hate Taylor Swift music."
| jeffbee wrote:
| How about "I hate reductive hackernewses who fail to engage
| constructively with the discourse and instead turn to gotcha
| language that 9-year-olds think is terribly clever"?
| paulddraper wrote:
| Sure, great example!
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| He's right though. "Not tolerating hate" is a paperthin
| principle, that would stand up to as much scrutiny as
| everything else Ello stood for, in hindsight. re, it was all
| bullshit and the warning signs should be called out as such
| so we know next time someone tries to bullshit us.
| wideopenjake wrote:
| I was head of technology for another "make a better world"
| social network, and we approached fostering positivity as a
| practice of encouraging constructive interaction and
| discouraging _destructive_ interaction.
|
| In other words, being directly abusive toward others was
| obviously destructive and discouraged, but disagreement, even
| when quite strong, was great, as long as everyone involved
| maintained a level of basic respect when interacting with each
| other.
|
| There's also a big difference between vehement dislike of a
| distant thing, concept or person, especially if one can express
| their reasons well, and using slurs or advocating violence or
| harm. I imagine here they used 'hate' to stand in for 'hate
| speech', but not being in their minds - I really don't know.
| edm0nd wrote:
| It's universally known that that means things like racist
| imagery/text content, not content like "I hate cake" or Tswift.
| wideopenjake wrote:
| Early on in Ello's life, possibly year 1, I interviewed for a job
| with them - back when their office was basically one floor of a
| residence, and all the engineers pretty much worked at a single
| dinner table packed with monitors. I probably scored the
| interview because of my previous experience as CTO of a startup
| social network for people who wanted social change (which we sold
| to Gaiam, and that's how it eventually died a few years later,
| but at least I ended up in the Denver/Boulder area).
|
| Anyway, the code test part of the interview involved pairing with
| another engineer on a small portion of the ello User model (their
| application was built with Ruby on Rails at the time), and I
| remember being rather underwhelmed by what they asked me to do,
| at least in terms of whether it provided a decent test of my
| abilities. I ended up sending a follow-up email expressing that,
| along with numerous polished samples of other project work.
|
| They ended up passing on me, but I stayed a member of ello for a
| while longer because I thought the idea might have promise. Maybe
| I left too early, but I eventually ditched it because... there
| was no "there", there.
|
| I liked their general idea, but... they could have done so much
| more with it, even with a small team. As it was, I left before
| ello ever got out of its "tumblr clone with way too much empty
| space" phase - if it ever did.
|
| RIP
| reso wrote:
| I'm not sure why this post focuses so much on the angel
| investment. There are probably 10 reasons why Ello failed,
| starting with the fact that bootstrapping social network
| userbases is hard, and ending with users won't pay for social
| networks. None of these are directly related to the fact they
| built the site with investor money and not volunteer hours.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I think it's fair critique for the post to focus on the VC (not
| angel) investment -- the expectations of VCs and pressure to
| deliver a profit could easily have been a significant factor in
| the decision made by the CEO to focus on substantial revenue
| growth.
| otteromkram wrote:
| I don't see why Ello didn't just turn into a Pinterest + Etsy +
| DeviantArt hybrid.
|
| Let artists show off work, let them seem their art/products, take
| a percentage of the sale as profit.
|
| Maybe that's a bad business model for a social-media-first
| platform.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-01-18 23:00 UTC)